SKIN DEEP; Taming Frizz And Setting Curls Free

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER

Published: January 18, 2007

GROWING up, I yearned to have lustrous straight hair that I could wear parted in the middle and let swing down my back, like Marcia Brady of ''The Brady Bunch'' or Laurie Partridge of ''The Partridge Family.''

In recent years, at my pleading, stylists have blown my hair into stick-straight submission, and when I'm unable to get to a salon, I dip into a cupboard full of frizz-taming products that help uncoil my curls and keep me from looking like my cocker spaniel.

Some people have bad-hair days. Until recently I was resigned to a bad-hair life.

But a tide of new products aimed at eliminating frizz, without forcing curlies to go blown-out straight, has entered the market.

''People with curly hair don't tend to be denying it anymore,'' said Mercedes Orpin, product development manager at Bumble & Bumble. ''It's no longer an either-or. It's all about whatever suits your fancy these days. Now you can have it any way you like. It is like a smorgasbord for hair.''

In 1998, when Michelle Breyer and Gretchen Heber of Austin, Tex., both journalists, were at a loss for how to battle their own corkscrew hair, they started Naturallycurly.com, a Web site and social network. At the time, there were few hair care products aimed at the frizzy- and curly-haired.

''For so long society has viewed people with curly or frizzy hair as that's not desirable, not attractive,'' said Ms. Breyer, 44, recalling how she relentlessly blew out her intensely curly hair during the ''Farrah Fawcett painful years.''

Dr. Mary Lamia, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Kentfield, Calif., said that feelings about one's hair run deep. Hair, after all, is a focal point of an individual's appearance, she said. For those with frizzy curly hair, she added, it can be ''a target for self-conscious feelings that can result in low self-esteem.''

''Unfortunately, hair seems to have a mind of its own, and curly frizzy hair can be outright incorrigible,'' Dr. Lamia said. But, she added, ''Controlling one's hair seems to be important to humans in general -- an attempt to control the perceptions others have about one's appearance.'' Add in marketing, she said, and a generation of self-loathing curly-haired women has sprung up.

Ginetta Candelario, an associate professor of sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies at Smith College, said the compulsion to have pin-straight hair grew out of the American experience. At the turn of the 20th century, she said, European women, particularly Jewish, Italian and Greek women who tend to have darker, curlier hair, would do whatever it took to wear their hair straight as a way to assimilate into American society.

The Vidal Sassoon revolution in the beauty-culture industry perpetuated the positive association with straight hair.

''It's not simply vanity on the part of women,'' Dr. Candelario said. ''In that setting, where the norm has been this lank-haired beauty, it becomes a source of a stigma, so you want to fix it.''

But that is changing. As mainstream hairstyle trends have become more diverse, a wider range of styles have become acceptable in the workplace, according to a November 2006 report on the $7.2 billion hair-care products market in the United States done by Packaged Facts, a publishing division of MarketResearch.com. And so, conservatively, there were about 70 frizz- and curl-related products introduced this year, compared with about 10 in 1996, said Cara Morrison, founder of Cogitamus Consulting in Manhattan and the report's author.

There are now more than 1,000 hair care products over all that help eliminate frizz, from John Frieda's Frizz-Ease regimen, which jump-started the market in 1991, to this year's Quiet Calm Curl Control, an organic shea butter, wheatgrass and orange oil-based moisturizing cream to enhance curls while providing style control, by Innersense. There is also Cutler Curling Cream; Citr?hine's Making Waves curl booster; Redken Crystal Curls, a defining shine gel; and None of Your Frizzness, a line of shampoo, conditioner and frizz leave-in cream by Herbal Essence.

Bumble & Bumble developed a silicone-based finishing product called Defrizz for blowing the hair straight in the 1990s, and three years ago added a moisturizing regimen. That product line, Curl Conscious, includes transglutaminase, an enzyme that ''goes into overdrive in heat and humidity,'' Ms. Orpin said.